The amount of information that is available to users over a network and the speed at which this information is available is ever increasing. For example, users may access news websites to read up-to-date articles even before those articles are available via traditional newspapers and broadcast television. Therefore, these websites may be used as a primary source of information by the users to learn about their surroundings.
Additionally, the types of techniques that may be employed by the users to obtain information is also ever increasing. One such technique is commonly referred to as a “web log” or “blog”. Web logs are typically provided as an online journal that is available via the web to other users. A “blogger”, for instance, may create and maintain posts for access by other users. Generally, the posts are limited only by the imagination of the blogger and therefore may range between a wide variety of subjects, e.g., from a personal diary to interviews regarding the news of the day. Because of this range of subjects, different blogs may be of interest to different subsets of the users. A variety of other types of techniques are also available.
One technique that has been developed to locate and consume portions of this information by different subsets of users is through the use of “web feeds”. A web feed, for instance, may contain items taken from news websites and blogs that are “published” via the web feed over the network to users. In this way, the users are made aware of the content described in the web feeds. For example, the items may contain summaries of stories, posts to web logs, and so on, that may be read by the user through use of a reader that obtains the web feed from over a network.
Traditional web feeds, however, did not include presence data relating the content included in the web feed, such as the online status of a user that originated the content described in the web feed. Therefore, although the web feed may be used to disseminate information, this information did not indicate availability of the originator (e.g., the “blogger”) for further communication, such as whether the blogger was currently “online”. Thus, these traditional techniques limited real-time interaction between the originator and consumers of the content.